Strategies for Innovating Archives

Are Startups More Innovative than Incumbent Counterparts? Evidence from AI Companies

I plan to study whether AI startups are more innovative than their incumbent counterparts. Although the extant literature highlights startups’ initial innovation capacities that help them identify and leverage market and technology opportunities, startups’ innovation competency at the founding stage no longer properly explains differences in competitive advantages in the digital era. Compared to traditional industries, companies in the digital era, such as AI firms leveraging big data, do not require capital-intensive manufacturing facilities to commercialize their ideas because the end products and services are digitized. Hence, the source of entrepreneurial innovation built upon the foundation-based explanation becomes obscure in the digital era, while it remains unclear what types of innovation startups vs. incumbents are better at during the post-foundation stages of startups. I argue that AI startups have competitive advantages in innovation against their incumbent counterparts based on different types of tech-based strategies for algorithm innovation. …Read More

Evolution of Internet Retailing and Buy vs. Make Decisions

We have obtained data from Digital Commerce 360 which publishes pertinent statistics on top 1000 internet retail sites. One interesting aspect of this data is detailed information regarding outsourcing/insourcing decisions including web hosting, search engine optimization services, product delivery etc. This is a pretty unique data spanning hundreds of companies and a last decade. We wish to use this data to analyze outsourcing decisions of internet retailers and how these choices affect their performance. The data shows variation across time and industries, and it is supplemented with many quantitative metrics for internet retailers including number of visitors, conversion rate and basket size etc. We believe this unique data will allow us to gain unique insights into make vs buy decisions by internet retailers.…Read More

Instant Payment Systems and Competition for Deposits

How do instant payment technologies impact financial intermediation? I use municipality-level data on the development of Pix in Brazil and combine it with branch-level banking data to provide evidence that instant payments positively impact deposit market competition—Pix usage increases checking, saving, and time deposits of small banks relative to large banks.…Read More

Pivoting and Experimentation in Lean Startups

While recent scholarly and practitioner research has stressed the importance of learning in entrepreneurial settings, little scholarly work has formally examined the mechanisms through which learning drives behavior in those settings. Specifically, we investigate how an active learning process based on evaluating performance relative to an aspiration drives the pivoting and experimentation behavior of startups in environments with high degrees of uncertainty and potentially intense selection pressures.…Read More

Motivating Goal Pursuit by Normalizing Difficulty

In this research, we test a simple messaging intervention to motivate individuals struggling in their goal pursuit. Specifically, we study the impact of setting a norm about the experience of goal pursuit. We suggest that informing consumers that it is normal to struggle during goal pursuit – a “difficult goal pursuit” norm – is an effective approach to motivating struggling consumers.…Read More

Effects of Privacy Policy in the Online Advertising Industry

This study is aimed at evaluating the impact of third party cookie elimination on brands and consumers. Our proposed study aims to examine and answer the following questions: What are the effects of the third-party cookie policy ban on consumers and brands…Read More

The Placeholder Effect: Using Break Days to Help Form Habits

This research aims to test a novel intervention to help people form healthy habits, such as exercise more. In particular, we will examine how encouraging people to have “placeholders” on their break days, or days off from pursuing their goals, affects their likelihood of reaching their goals.…Read More

Work From Home: Who Gains and Who Does Not?

In this study, considering the benefits and costs of WFM, we consider two questions: (1) who has an incentive to work from home, (2) how is team coherence and work performance impacted when individuals work from home?…Read More

Minority Entrepreneurship and Alternative Opportunities inside Established Organizations

Research has primarily focused on independently owned ventures, but individuals can also engage in startup activities via intrapreneurship—by launching and operating new ventures inside established organizations. We propose that these internal routes of new-venture formation offer a more inclusive pathway for racial minorities than external routes.…Read More

To Diversify or Not? Multi-Platform Social Media Strategy and E-Commerce Performance

Xiaoning (Gavin) Wang, PhD Candidate, Lynn Wu, Operations, Information and Decisions, and Serguei Netessine, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: As the number of social platforms has grown dramatically in the past two decades, companies face an increasing number of options to choose among for their social media resource…Read More

Artificial Intelligence, Lean Method and Startup Product Innovation

As startups are at the forefront of adopting AI tools, it is important to understand whether AI can amplify the effects of lean methods in helping startups to be even more responsive to market conditions that before. And if so, to what extent and under what conditions AI can complement lean method in developing products.…Read More

The Consequences of Prosocial Signals That Leak Political Information for Job-Seekers

I will explore whether job-seekers use these signals in a sophisticated or naïve fashion with respect to the political information that leaks through. I will also examine how employers respond to job-seekers who include such signals in their applications.…Read More

Information Ambiguity in Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities is characterized by high uncertainty because entrepreneurs look to find unsatisfied demand with their new products or services. In an attempt to reduce uncertainty, entrepreneurs experiment with potential customers, seeking feedback through interviews or prototypes. It allows the entrepreneurs to learn about the targeted market and whether their idea can satisfy that demand.…Read More

Patents: Ability or Choice?

This paper’s main contributions are to use a novel data set, introduce a new natural experiment, and exploit a quasi-random shock to show that patenting choices affect three important dimensions of innovation outcomes: the patent quantity, the patent quality, and the firm-level inputs (R&D, investment, and employees).…Read More

Talent Market Competition and Technology Spillovers

This research project aims to understand how innovation propagates through the reallocation of talents, and how this innovation diffusion process is shaped by the competition structure of talent labor markets. Specifically, we exploit various heterogenous shocks to firms, including credit supply shocks, financial constraints shocks, innovation shocks, to examine how firms react in their hiring and firing decisions under different competition structures of talent labor markets.…Read More

Generalization and Exploration in Novel Environments

This study aims to highlight the generalization problem as a core challenge in organizational learning and strategic decision-making and explore how decision-makers may address this problem via different learning and choice strategies.…Read More

Measuring Strategic Behavior by Gig Economy Workers: Multihoming and Repositioning

Using a structural model, we show that workers are highly heterogenous in their preferences for both multihoming and repositioning. We provide counterfactual estimates on the effects of proposed firm and regulatory policies aimed at multihoming and repositioning.…Read More

Social Media and Startup Innovation: A Human Capital Perspective

In this study we plan to fill this research gap by examining whether social media can help startups to access broader knowledge and subsequently facilitate innovation. Our goal is twofold in this research. First, we explore the effect of social media adoption on startup’s knowledge diversity. Second, we analyze whether startups can successfully transfer the diversified knowledge into innovations.…Read More

Field Experiments to Measure the Impact of Solar Lights at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Providing access to cleaner and cheaper lighting solutions is necessary to lift people out of poverty. The magnitude of the economic, health, and educational impacts created by these lighting solutions as we move up the energy ladder, however, is not clear.…Read More

Industry-University Collaboration and Commercializing Chinese Corporate Innovation

We examine how industry-university collaboration (IUC) enhances Chinese firms’ commercialization of their technologies using a comprehensive dataset of medium- sized and large industrial firms and research universities in China.…Read More